Jenise wrote:I dunno. He cites a '61 Bordeaux that he shared with 14 other tasters over four years.

This is not a situation I have any interest in duplicating.

I understand - for me, the appeal is not the ability to savor a special wine over an extended period - it's the ability to follow the evolution of a wine without having to open a full bottle. So you can decide whether you want to drink a wine at a particular stage in it's life without finding out the hard way that it wasn't ready, or was in an awkward stage.

"The sun, with all those planets revolving about it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else to do"Galileo Galilei

(avatar: me next to the WIYN 3.5 meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory)

Ryan M wrote: you can decide whether you want to drink a wine at a particular stage in it's life without finding out the hard way that it wasn't ready, or was in an awkward stage.

I did understand that, and as someone who ages most of the red wine I buy, I understand how one would benefit from this device. I just couldn't resist taking a shot at that one example! (Or my own lack of self-discipline.)

My wine shopping and I have never had a problem. Just a perpetual race between the bankruptcy court and Hell.--Rogov

If I had lots of wine that came in at $100 per ounce or more, this might be a justified purchase, but I don't. I'll just keep consulting cellartracker, talking to friends, reading the WLDG and buying cases to try one bottle at a time to see when they're ready.

Cool gadget, though. It seems like it would be perfect for selling fake-labeled wines. By the good stuff, suck all the wine out and replace it with crap and resell the bottle.

Jon Peterson wrote:If I had lots of wine that came in at $100 per ounce or more, this might be a justified purchase, but I don't. I'll just keep consulting cellartracker, talking to friends, reading the WLDG and buying cases to try one bottle at a time to see when they're ready.

The limitation of getting advice from others on when a wine is too young vs ready vs mature vs over the hill is that their advice is necessarily for their palate. This would give you the ability to determine all of that for your own palate

But I also like the idea that one could follow the evolution of a wine with arbitrarily high frequency. On could literally buy a just a couple of bottles and able to taste the wine yearly over it's life cycle. I find that prospect fascinating - that's the science geek in me of course - but it allows you to study the evolution of wine in such a detailed way! Also, buying a couple of bottles for tracking the evolution of a wine long term is much more cost feasible than buying say two cases to do the same thing - many of us can't afford to buy ageworthy wine by the case. So, something like this could be a cost-effective investment from that perspective - I still wouldn't buy it for $300, but as it gains popularity and the scale of production increases, the cost is likely to come down.

"The sun, with all those planets revolving about it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else to do"Galileo Galilei

(avatar: me next to the WIYN 3.5 meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory)